Mac Mini VaultColo your Mac Mini2015-07-27T14:17:06Zhttp://www.macminivault.com/feed/atom/WordPressmmc-adminhttp://www.macminivault.com/?p=37442015-07-14T19:44:47Z2015-07-14T19:41:03ZContinue reading →]]>When running headless, recent versions of OS X (10.7+) can experience less than ideal graphics performance via VNC/Screen Sharing. Faking a display with a video dongle/GPU enhancer greatly helps to resolve this issue. Mac Mini Vault is on our 3rd revision of Video Dongles and we’ve been offering free use of them to our customers hosted in our data centers. Our latest version is HDMI based and is available in 1080p or 4k mode. 4k support requires a Late-2014 Mac mini or newer. Keep in mind the two versions are identical hardware that uses different firmware to simulate various resolutions. 4k will give higher resolution, however that higher resolution may impact performance.

Make sure to click the checkbox for our dongle / GPU enhancer options when placing your order. This option is available at no additional cost!

]]>0mmc-adminhttp://www.macminivault.com/?p=37362015-06-23T21:14:04Z2015-06-23T21:11:57ZContinue reading →]]>On June 22nd, 2015 several strong storm systems made their way through Wisconsin. Shortly after our MKE1 Datacenter lost utility power. Approximately 20,000 accounts with the local utility company were without power in Milwaukee county. This was at approximately 11:10 AM (CDT -5 GMT).

Both MKE1-DC1 and MKE1-DC2 were running on battery power for the brief moment before all of our backup generators automatically turned on. We remained on generator power into the afternoon. Around 1:30 PM (CDT -5 GMT) one of our larger generators experienced an issue that caused it to shut the engine down. CyberLynk engineers were able to clear the errors and were able to start it back up and temporarily resolve the issue. During that time parts of MKE1-DC2 ran on battery power. MKE1-DC1 was fully powered by UPS and generator power during this time.

Although we were able to keep that generator running, there were several off/on cycles that drained our multiple UPS battery reserves with MKE1-DC2. At 1:43 PM (CDT -5 GMT) one of our UPS systems exhausted all battery power and we lost power to several cabinets (including the MMV A and B cabinets) and some core networking equipment within our MKE1-DC2 datacenter. By 2:18 PM (CDT -5 GMT) stable generator power was restored. By then factory technicians (generator) were onsite starting with a permanent resolution for the generator. Shortly after at 2:33 PM (CDT -5 GMT) utility power was restored. Total downtime for most customers was 25 minutes.

During that short outage time our websites, ticket system, and support chat were all available. Our phone system was briefly unavailable. We were posting regular updates to twitter, which is the best place for quick updates. We will continue to evolve our checks and tests for our generator systems as well as move forward on our long term generator projects. We do apologize for the inconvenience. We’ve published uptime reports through pingdom who is an un-biased 3rd party uptime monitoring service. For the past 18 months, since we’ve started the public 3rd party monitoring, MKE1 has held 99.99% uptime. That includes the downtime described above. We deeply appreciate our customers and work hard day in and out to keep their Mac servers online and happy.

Use promo code ‘MMV-5for6′ when signing up for either of these two plans between now and June 30th, 2015 and we’ll discount the colocation service down to $5 a month for the first 6 months. You need to supply your own Mac mini to use this service. We do have Mac mini models for sale and for rent. After the 6 month promotional price, the monthly rate is a industry leading value at $49.99/month and includes the following features:

Some more details….
– This is available to new and current customers signing up for a new colocation slot
– After the 6 month promotional price, customers can downgrade to the Core plan ($29.99/mo)
– The promotion runs from June 16, 2015 to June 30, 2015
– Hardware is not included in colocation costs – see this page for Mac mini and upgrade pricing

]]>0mmc-adminhttp://www.macminivault.com/?p=36812015-03-30T13:51:55Z2015-03-30T13:51:55ZContinue reading →]]>We have been testing VMware ESXi 6 since last summer. While the final ‘GA’ version was announced early in February, it just recently was available to the public. This version will install without any modifications on the Late-2012 Mac mini or Late-2013 Mac Pro models. Only the Mac Pro is supported by VMware and considered VMware compatible. We have many customers with stable ESXi deployments on Mac minis. ESXi is a lightweight hypervisor that replaces OS X as the main OS and allows virtualization of Linux, Windows, and OS X. ESXi is easily controlled via a Windows native vSphere client. For basic control and console access, VMware Fusion 7 Pro is will do the trick. All of our Alternative OS options are laid out here. We also offer bare metal installations of CentOS, Ubuntu, and Windows Server.

The previous model Mac mini server with the quad core i7 is great for ESXi and virtualization. We have limited availability of these models still new-in-box. We also have a small number of lightly used quad-core Mac minis as well. Contact us for more details on those.

]]>0mmc-adminhttp://stage.macminivault.com/?p=36092015-03-13T19:08:37Z2015-03-11T18:50:24ZContinue reading →]]>Later this year marks our 5 year anniversary at Mac Mini Vault. We’ve been working on a new website design and wanted to launch it in a big way. In the past 5 years we’ve had many fun projects like our Apple TV Webserver and telling our story in a video. Almost a year ago we had the idea to send a Mac mini up above 100,000 feet for some great photos and video shots. After extensive research we partnered up with John from nearspaceballooning.com. Our goal was to launch near our Phoenix, Arizona data center. There would be many complications trying to launch near Milwaukee, especially in the winter months. Our scheduled launch date was February 22, 2015. The wind speeds were higher than normal and forced us to readjust our plans. We started with a desired landing area and the modeling projections pushed our launch area out to the Colorado River. At 3:30pm (MST) the Mac mini payload was launched outside Blythe, CA right on the bank of the Colorado River. We started tracking the payload as we drove out to Wickenburg, AZ. Right around the time the sun was setting we received the signals confirming the landing coordinates. Luckily it landed near a trail that branched out from a highway. We reached the trail as the sun set and spent about an hour off road in the dark and to find the payload safe and secure. The cameras were still running. We successfully sent a Mac mini up to 111,998 feet.

Note:To stay within regulations for payload weight,
we did have to remove most of the internals of the Mac mini.

Payload Recovered!

]]>0mmc-adminhttp://www.macminivault.com/?p=28182015-02-10T19:32:27Z2015-01-15T16:41:31ZContinue reading →]]>We have some great news. We were able to secure a large order of ‘new old stock’ Mac mini Servers. These Mac minis have the powerful quad-core i7 CPU which is the most powerful Mac mini ever made. The RAM can be upgraded to 16GB and we can also install SSD drives in them. These machines are great if you need to do any type of virtualization or have processes that demand high CPU performance.

We also have a small supply of VALUE Mac minis available. They normally sell out very quick. The VALUE Mac minis do have upgradeable memory and can have a second internal hard drive installed.

There is also plenty of brand new 2014 model Mac minis in stock and ready to go. We stock models with 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB options. The 16GB models also have the CPU upgraded a 3.0Ghz dual-core i7. We have certified the new model Mac minis for all of our Alt OS options as well!

We offer a rent2own option for all of the Mac mini models. Rent2own splits up the cost of the Mac mini over 12 months without any fees or interest charges.

To celebrate the new year we’re running a 50% off 5 months of our Mac mini colo ‘Enterprise’ and Mac Pro colo ‘Pro’ plans. Use promo code MMV-50off5.

Promo runs through the end of January – only applicable on new colo plans.

]]>0mmc-adminhttp://www.macminivault.com/?p=27962015-03-02T21:00:06Z2015-01-02T21:13:56ZContinue reading →]]>We utilize many tools both internal and external to our network for monitoring. In the 20 year history of CyberLynk (parent company of Mac Mini Vault), we’ve maintained a stable network that experiences little downtime. We introduced some major changes in 2014 to help us centralize our monitoring efforts as well as transparently share our network status with our customers. It’s also important that the data we share is accurate and unbiased. We have public reports from Pingdom that shows uptime at our data centers. Pingdom has been in business since 2007 and tests our data centers from 60 different host nodes between North America and Europe. They provide an accurate and unbiased 3rd party uptime report.

It’s important to realize that we are talking about data center uptime. A single Mac mini has one network port and one power supply. We measure and report uptime at a facility level. There are occasions where downtime affects a small number customers on a specific switch or PDU — or simply their Mac mini is having hardware or software issues. We recommend hosting a few Mac servers between our locations for customers that can not afford any downtime what-so-ever.

Here are the report summaries from 2014. Pingdom reports MKE1 (Milwaukee, WI) as 99.99% uptime and PHX1 (Phoenix, AZ) as 100% uptime. MKE1 did have a brief network issue earlier in the year. The other small downtime outages that Pingdom is catching are various peering or routing hiccups between network providers outside of our network.

]]>0mmc-adminhttp://www.macminivault.com/?p=27652015-03-02T21:00:56Z2014-12-17T19:19:34ZContinue reading →]]>This weekend we are celebrating 4 years of running Mac Mini Vault. Next year is exciting as it’s not only going to be our 5th anniversary, but our parent company CyberLynk’s 20th anniversary. It’s amazing to see how our service has grown over the past 4 years. We have of our customers to thank for that. We’re constantly challenged to improve and grow. We add to and enhance features regularly. It’s equally rewarding to see our customers grow and use our infrastructure to create great things.

2014 seemed to fly right by, it’s amazing to look back and see how much happened in the year:

December 2013 – We first posted our design of our Mac Pro cabinet [Link]December 2013 – We added Level(3) as a bandwidth provider to our MKE1 Data Center [Link]January 2014 – Phase 1 construction of our MKE1 DC3 build-out started [Link]February 2014 – We announced our Phoenix Location [Link]March 2014 – After a year of running IPv6, we’re still the only Mac hosting service to offer itMarch 2014 – Our PHX1 Data Center went live (99.999% uptime since we’ve been live) [Link]July 2014 – We made a video highlighting our services [Link]August 2014 – We integrated Watchman Monitoring into our customer portal [Link]September 2014 – Apple patched OS X 10.7 and newer for ShellShock. We made a 10.6 patch [Link]October 2014 – We did a tear down and benchmark review of the new Mac mini [Link]October 2014 – We finished construction on our new NOC at our MKE1 Data CenterNovember 2014 – Mac Pro cabinet went online after much testing – very close to the original design! [Link]December 2014 – Started electrical and ladder racking work in our MKE1 DC3 build-outDecember 2014 – We improved our MySQL installer script for Yosemite support [Link]

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements in 2015!

]]>0mmc-adminhttp://www.macminivault.com/?p=27472015-03-12T02:05:00Z2014-12-09T21:32:04ZContinue reading →]]>A few years ago we started writing scripts that help install MySQL on OS X. In OS X 10.6 and prior, MySQL was included with the “Server” version of the OS. With the move to Server.app, Apple removed MySQL. Which coincidentally is not long after Oracle acquired Sun which included MySQL. MySQL had a GUI installer for OS X that worked well, but was missing a few things that made it ready to work with Apache/PHP out of the box. Our installer took care of those items as well as set the root password randomly. The default install has root enabled without a password. We took the installer one step forward by adding features for installing a modified MySQL configuration file, and Sequel Pro (a GUI front end for MySQL). Then Yosemite was released recently and our installer had a few issues.

The upgrade to Yosemite did spring cleaning to OS X. There were long outstanding bugs that were resolved and deprecated commands/functions that were finally removed. MySQL had been using a StartupItem configuration to allow an end user to easily set MySQL to start on boot. This setup has been out of date since the OS X 10.4 days. Yosemite will not autostart via a StartupItem. You can easily write a Launchd plist file to auto-start MySQL, but the nice MySQL preference pane that allows a user to turn MySQL off and on again would not function. There is a supporting script from MySQL that handles the start/stop/status functions for the preference pane. What we did in our latest installer is created a Launchd plist that looks for networking to start up, and when ready, use the MySQL support script to start MySQL. This allows MySQL to start on boot, and still retains all use of the MySQL Preference pane.

We also specifically set the MySQL installer to not even attempt to install the Startup Items. Our latest version also should fix the ‘pid could not be found/error not running’ error that some people experienced in the past! (Edit: maybe not every pid error scenario)

To install MySQL copy and paste this into Terminal (Be sure to read the READ ME first):bash

The great thing about hosting our scripts on github, is that others can easily follow our development and provide input or code that we may merge into our codebase. Star/Watch our Mac-Scripts repo and be sure to let us know of any issues or requests on Github!

]]>0mmc-adminhttp://www.macminivault.com/?p=27112015-03-03T20:35:18Z2014-11-14T16:22:48ZContinue reading →]]>Nearly a year from when we first announced the design, our Mac Pro Vault cabinet is fully online. MacProVault.com went live in October and all current Mac Pro hosting customers have been converted to our new Mac Pro colocation plans. We have options for both the Tower style Mac Pro and the new black Mac Pro.

Read the full details on how we designed the cabinet and all the details on our Mac Pro services. [LINK]